The Good Boys Club (Mythical Mishaps #2)

30. You Saw the Whole of the Moon

You Saw the Whole of the Moon

Present Day

Cian

This morning Mash proved me wrong.

I thought that man couldn’t possibly get any more attractive, no fucking way, but he blew my theory right out of the water. He grew a moustache. Well, not so much grew it as shaved everything else off besides the tash, and now he was so fucking gorgeous I wanted to weep every time I looked at him. He’d spent the entire evening whispering into my ear, rubbing the tip of his nose over the crook of my neck, and tickling my skin with his—still pretty short—moustache hairs.

He’d said it was because werewolves nuzzled, and if anyone were to glance over at our table, they’d expect to see two newly mated wolves nuzzling. That it’d look weird if we didn’t nuzzle. I wasn’t sure how much of his statement I believed, but to hell was I turning down the opportunity to have Mash’s face rubbed all over me.

It occurred to me he was, at the most basic level, scenting himself—his cum, the eau de Mash I’d rubbed all over my neck in the shower last night. But the smell was doing whatever magic it was supposed to be doing, because he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, leave me alone.

We’d had a fantastic meal at The Full Moon restaurant. This in itself should have been enough to convince Mash that Lykos was the right place for him, that long term he’d be happy here, but evidently he needed more, and now was in the middle of a panic attack.

I knew why. He didn’t have to say anything to me. He had begun grieving his old life in Remy.

I tugged him over to my car. He climbed into the passenger side and I got into the driver’s.

Mash didn’t speak as I drove off the B&B grounds and back onto Howling Pines. He watched me, his fingers idly tracing the new decoration on his top lip.

Eventually, I pulled the car over in a lay-by at the edge of his pack’s reserve. I threw my belt off and jumped out.

“Why are we here?” he said, following me, frowning through his confusion. “I thought you were gonna take me for dessert.”

“You just had two cheesecakes at Clem’s.”

“Yeah?”

I cupped his shoulder and spun him to face me. “Look, I know you’re panicking about giving everything up for . . . this. You miss Remy, and you’re wondering how you’ll ever cope here in the middle of nowhere. So I thought I’d show you why this is your place, Mash. This place is perfect for you. I know you never told me about the alpha thing, and I understand why, but having been here in Howling Pines, I get why you—not Clem, or Zac, or Mika, but you—were chosen as the alpha.”

Mash pursed his lips together, no doubt holding back a retort.

“Come, I need you to see this.” I grabbed his hand and started walking into the forest. It took only a minute before the trees became so dense they blocked the road from our view. We walked on for a few more minutes, our destination a tall pine tree of . . . some variety. I came to a stop at its base.

He narrowed his eyes at me, and I worried I might miss the mark completely.

“Okay, so . . .” I tried to sound as sure as I felt a moment ago. “This is Exhibit A.”

Mash still said nothing. He raised a questioning brow and drew his finger and thumb down over his moustache.

“Consider old man’s beard . . . your favourite lichen,” I said, holding my hand out in a tah-dah kind of way.

Mash dug his hands into the pockets of his shorts. He chewed his lip, but couldn’t hide the smile beginning to form. Fine, he was playing hard to get.

“Old man’s beard, right? I’ve forgotten the scientific name for it. Grows where the air is really clean. Don’t get any old man’s beard in Remy, do we?”

“How do you know what my favourite lichen is?”

Gods, had there ever been a more adorably delivered line? “Because five years ago you took a research fellow job at RU and your very first lecture was about identifying lichen. You made me sit and listen as you practiced your speech for hours and hours. And you didn’t know this at the time, but I snuck in to watch the real thing. Sat at the back in disguise.”

“I knew that was you,” he said softly.

“I was in disguise,” I reiterated, somewhat irritated he’d never told me he knew.

“Wearing a maroon beanie instead of a mustard beanie doesn’t really count as a disguise.” Mash tilted his head to the side and gave me a curious smile. “So, this is why I should be happy about moving here? My favourite lichen?”

I spun him around in a circle. “It’s everywhere. That means the air is super fucking clean here.” I drew a short vertical line in the air with my finger. “Howling pines one: Remy nil.”

He snorted. “Oka—”

“I’m not done yet.”

I marched off down a long sloping bank. Mash followed until I stopped again, seemingly at random. It wasn’t at random, though, far from it. We had been on several hikes over the past few weeks, and this spot had stuck out in my mind. I hadn’t thought about why, but now I understood.

“Do you remember the very first week of uni? I asked you what your favourite tree was. What did you say?” I said.

“Pines.” Pines were his go-to answer. He loved them, yes, but Mash was a lot more complex than the simple short answers he gave everyone else.

I pointed to a tree in front of him.

Mash looked up and up at it. A medium-sized trunk rose twenty feet into a firework of busy foliage and spiky green fruits. The mace-like seed pods littered the soil at the base of the tree. Some had split open, revealing their shiny brown treasures.

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve forgotten. I remember what you said. You said, ‘This time of year, horse chestnut, because of all the conkers.’ ”

“How do you remember that?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I placed my hands on his shoulders and gently pushed him, turning him around forty-five degrees. “And then you said, ‘In the spring, my favourites are the limes, because of the blossom scent, though they have nothing to do with the citrus fruit.’ ” I pointed to what I was about eighty percent sure was a lime tree. If it wasn’t, Mash was either going to roll his eyes or pretend it was to spare my feelings.

“What the fuck?” he said in a whisper.

I spun him around a little farther. “And in the winter, willow, but specifically Stalix Bricks . . . something.”

“Salix alba Britzensis,” he corrected. “Because of the red stems . . . How . . . ?”

The red stems were almost completely covered by narrow feather-like leaves, but they were there. We were rewarded with sporadic peeks as the gentle wind rustled through.

“And in summer, you said nothing beats an oak because it grows like a motherfucker and gets massive really quickly and is great for climbing.” I turned him one last time to stand directly in front of probably the biggest oak tree I’d ever seen.

It was the type of tree that would feature on the cover of fairy-tale books, or the kind that a child would draw. The most idealistic, most simplistic, stripped-back image of a tree imaginable. At a soul-deep level, I understood its appeal for Mash.

“I did say all those things, didn’t I?” he asked, the words quiet, in awe.

“You did. Have any of your favourites changed?”

“No. They’re all still the same.”

“Thought so. Fancy a climb?”

Mash laughed, pushed the hair off his forehead, ran his teeth over his bottom lip. “Okay, fine, but what about this?” He pointed to something over my shoulder, but I knew him too well.

We both darted towards the oak at the same time.

Of course Mash reached it first—his legs were longer, and he knew this terrain as though it were a part of him. He’d probably climbed this tree several times as a boy. He already knew where the footholds were, and the knots, and random branches.

Mash was thirty feet from the ground in seconds, and I could do nothing except follow in his wake, trying to remember where he placed his feet and fingers, and half wishing I’d worn trainers instead of boots.

About midway up, the trunk split into two. The main part continued to rise into the clouds, but a fat branch shot out laterally. It was here that Mash settled himself, shuffling onto the middle and draping his legs either side like he was riding a horse. I mirrored his movements, but faced him and kept my back against the vertical trunk for stability.

“Fuck, you were right,” Mash said after a few moments of staring at nothing in the distance. “This is my perfect place. I love it here, Bangers. So much.” Though he didn’t sound convinced. He breathed out a heavy sigh. “I’d . . . forgotten.”

“Oaks are my favourite trees too,” I said. I didn’t tell him I’d never had a favourite tree until I met him. This had all been his doing. “Have you climbed this tree before?”

Mash smiled and pointed to a spot just over my shoulder. Gingerly, and gripping my thighs around the branch as tightly as I could, I craned my neck to see Z+K carved into the trunk. The cuts had healed, fresh bark scabbed over the jagged lines of the letters. Mash’s brother had obviously been kissing boys in trees years ago, possibly decades.

“You should never do that, by the way.” He pointed to the initials again. For a second I thought he’d meant I shouldn’t kiss boys in trees. “You can open up a—”

“Gateway into the tree for pathogens and fungal infections and parasites or something.”

“Aw, you listened to me.” He let his eyes linger on me for a while then took in the expansive canopy.

Mash sighed. I couldn’t tell if it was a happy, nostalgic sigh, or if he was still in bereavement. Or perhaps it was a little of both.

“This was Zach’s favourite climbing tree. When we were kids, we’d play shipwrecked pirates and our mission was to make it to the ocean, which was not the lake as you’d imagine but Mam’s workshop. The girls were the dastardly human navy, and if they caught us, they would drag us back to the stocks. The stocks were the stone plinth where the successor accepts the alpha’s call. I’m only this second realising the irony there. Clem knew where to find us every single time. She was so good at sniffing us out.”

“Did you have a favourite climbing tree?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I had to chop it down a few years ago. It got damaged in a storm. Lightning. It probably could have stayed, but it was safer to take it down, especially because it was so close to Mam’s workshop.”

He didn’t say it out loud, but I knew that tree was the one we kissed on the other day. When we went from friends pretending to be lovers, to friends who maybe are lovers but are also still sorta pretending but also kind of not, and holy fucking shit, when did this become so complicated? And was any of it real?

We’d talked about sex, and casual kissing, but where were the lines drawn for what was pretend and what was Mash sating his curiosities? And was there anything that fell outside of those lines? Was there anything more real than that? Because it certainly felt that way. Or was Mash simply getting everything out of his system now because in two months’ time we’d be several hours apart?

“Thank you . . . for bringing me here,” he said. “It’s . . . helped. I can’t guarantee I won’t freak out again. My mind is . . . fucking noisy right now.”

I nudged his fingertips with mine. “Always.”

“When . . . I’m alpha, can I call you? Like whenever I’m having a moment. Do you promise you’ll be there for me then?”

“Of course,” I said, but the words barely came out.

He gave me that look again, chewing his thumbnail and sizing me up as though deciding on his next move. And then suddenly, he pushed himself to his feet and pulled himself up to the next branch, another five foot from the ground.

“Come on,” he said, before disappearing into the canopy.

I didn’t move. “No thank you. I’m safe here.” Sure, I worked out . . . sometimes, but I did not possess the same natural upper-body strength as Mash.

“Mash?” I called after I hadn’t heard anything from him for a couple of minutes. “Mash? Please don’t make me come to you. I’m already too high, and if I go any higher, I’ll fall.”

“Bangers,” he said, the sound coming from somewhere above me.

The evening sunlight poked through the gaps in the foliage. I shielded my eyes from the rays and tried to locate Mash, but before I’d had a real chance, he dropped in front of me. For five, ten seconds, he just hung there, the crotch of his shorts at eye level. Then he found his footholds, or whatever the fuck he was looking for, and lowered himself all the way to the branch, his entire body now flush with mine.

He laughed, took my face in both of his hands. “I won’t let you fall.” And then he kissed me.

When he stopped for air, he wouldn’t look at me. Instead, he stared at the ends of the branches, where they turned to twigs and sprouted leaves.

“I could be happy here,” he said.

Could.

Either Mash was saying yes, he would eventually be happy here, or he was saying his happiness was conditional.

“You wanna go for a swim?” he asked, seemingly out of nowhere. Though we weren’t far from the lake, so maybe it wasn’t from nowhere.

“Mash?” I felt like I needed to break through this strange wall he’d pulled up. He was grieving. Soon everything would be so different for him—no city, no city life, no girls on tap. Only the never-ending wilderness of Lykos. “Sure, a swim sounds great, but I can’t get down from this tree. So, I’m just gonna have to stay here forever.”

“Climb on my back like a baby koala bear, and I’ll carry you down,” he said in complete seriousness.

“Okay, no. Fuck no. I’ll just wait here until exhaustion or starvation drops my lifeless corpse to the ground like a fucking nut.”

“Suit yourself,” Mash said, effortlessly sliding down to the branch four feet below us. “But I was thinking I might like to try sucking your cock for the first time.”

Damn him.

“Fine, I’m coming.” I sighed, and very, very carefully eased myself down to the lower branch, making sure my boots were secure before leaning all my weight onto it.

“You will be.”